Saturday, October 29, 2011

As is probably obvious to anyone who has spent any time following this blog at all, the Foxes take our holiday traditions seriously. There are things that we have to do together (or at least as together as we can manage), and there are ways we need to get it done (though the sequence can vary a little form year to year), or else the whole routine just won't be as meaningful as it might. Halloween included! Sometimes it doesn't work out, of course--but this year, I have to say I'm pretty proud at how our Jack-o'-lantern carving orgy turned out this year.

You can't do it too long before Halloween, because prolonged exposure to the elements will give you collapsing and, often, stinky pumpkins. (I've sometimes wondered about carving some other kind of gourd, to see if they have better holding power through unexpectedly hot days and/or freezing and/or rainy nights, but I've gotten around to trying.) But of course, waiting until the day of their display really defeats the purpose; you won't get any enjoyment out of them then. So we always find an evening three or four days before the holiday, and we all dig in. (This evening we were joined by a friend of Alison's, who joyfully joined it.)

I doubt we're particularly unique in this family carving night, but I do think we have one twist that is a little peculiar: we always have It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown playing while we do so. I'm not sure how it started; I suppose I or someday else decreed, years ago, that we had to watch that show (it's my favorite of all the Peanuts specials) every Halloween, and so doing it on carving night made the most sense. I can recall that in distant times, long ago, we would actually haul the television set and the dvd player into the kitchen, or else move our carving to a table in whatever room our one tv sits in. So chalk one victory up for technology, I guess.

Anyway, they turned out great--mine in particular, he says rather smugly. (Though one of our tiny carving knives broke while we were working on it; we'll have to replace it with a new one once all the Halloween stuff goes on discount sale in three days.) Fun times at the Foxes, for one and all.

Quotes

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."